Morning Meeting and Academics
You may have heard it said: “Morning Meeting isn’t another thing you add to the plate—it is the plate.” If you use Morning Meeting in your classroom, you know about its benefits: a well-crafted Morning Meeting helps children transition into the school day, builds community, promotes social skills, supports learning, and more. Still, if you’ve been doing Morning Meeting for a while now—or if you need to prove that Morning Meeting time is “time on learning”—strengthening the connections between your Morning Meetings and your academic curriculum is a good idea.
You can incorporate academic elements into any part of Morning Meeting—greeting, sharing, group activity, or morning message. For instance, do an activity like “Sparkle,” which uses spelling words—or ask a question in the message that gets students thinking about a new topic of study. One piece of advice: try challenging yourself to vary the subject areas you address, so you do something with a different subject each day—a math-focused greeting on Monday, science-oriented sharing on Tuesday, an activity that draws on social studies knowledge on Wednesday, etc.
These books are a good place to start looking for ideas about integrating academics into Morning Meeting:
Tags: Engaging Academics
